Number 13

Admirers of Germanic Scandinavia – I am fortunate enough to count myself among their numbers – will all concur that what distinguishes this miraculous swath of civilization from the rest of our globe is something we may term secularity, but what is better understood as modernity. Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and my beloved Denmark have all endured enormous changes when one considers at what juncture of development these countries lay just a century ago (as depicted, for example, in this film). Yet peace and prosperity, both of which have been showered on Scandinavia for almost seventy years, have that funny tendency of making the beneficiaries forget about basic values. Scandinavians have dammed that slippery slope by the sanest hybrid of capitalism and social welfare the world has ever seen, and while a few are frightfully rich, far fewer can be deemed frightfully poor. Such is the point of government: help the weak, allow the strong to flourish only when they simultaneously aid society, and allow everyone the same opportunities. The results, of course, will necessarily not be the same. There will be still be arrogant peeves over materialism, individual freedoms, and the separation of Church and state, and there is little we can do for people so devoid of imagination that they need their neuroses ballasted in law. Which brings us to this old tale.

We find ourselves in this town, somewhere between the Great Wars, but definitely far out of the reach of current events. Our protagonist is a certain Mr. Anderson, a Church scholar and linguist particularly enamored with the migration of faiths through these Northern lands. His current journey is justified by the news that "in the Rigsarkiv [National Archive] of Viborg there were papers, saved from the fire [of 1726], relating to the last days of Roman Catholicism in the country." Of course, there is no such thing as the "last days of Roman Catholicism," simply the first days of another, closely related system of beliefs – but let us be more precise. What should be understood here is that the original formations of faith are never swept away by novelty, however long novelty has been around; they invariably persist in some form or another. Hence the omission of room 13 from circulation at our destination, the Viborg lodge the Golden Lion, something "which Anderson had already noticed half a dozen times in his experience of Danish hotels." Anderson wishes himself a larger room, and gets it: room twelve, "fairly high and unusually long" with three windows on its side. Very satisfied with this arrangement, he plans his long workdays with that mirth unique to scholars. And since he first entered his quarters during daytime, it is only at night that he remarks the anomalies:

It was not difficult for him to find his way back to his own door. So, at least, he thought; but when he arrived there, and turned the handle, the door entirely refused to open, and he caught the sound of a hasty movement towards it from within. He had tried the wrong door, of course. Was his own room to the right or to the left? He glanced at the number: it was 13 .... [Later] it occur[red] to him that, whereas on the blackboard of the hotel there had been no Number 13, there was undoubtedly a room numbered 13 in the hotel. He felt rather sorry he had not chosen it for his own. Perhaps he might have done the landlord a little service by occupying it, and given him the chance of saying that a well-born English gentleman had lived in it for three weeks and liked it very much. But probably it was used as a servant's room or something of the kind. After all, it was most likely not so large or good a room as his own. And he looked drowsily about the room, which was fairly perceptible in the half-light from the street-lamp. It was a curious effect, he thought. Rooms usually look larger in a dim light than a full one, but this seemed to have contracted in length and grown proportionately higher.

Nowadays, of course, Danes couldn't care less whether an Englishman – well-born or otherwise – stayed in a hotel or, for that matter, did anything at all. Our scholar betakes himself to the National Archive the next day and represses this oddity.

What happens subsequently is, for the most part, what one can expect to happen in a story by James, that is, fantastic eloquence striped with utter dread. As is also common in his work, the tale is related by someone who did not experience it – the very hallmark of ghost stories who nourish themselves on the amplifications of word-of-mouth. In this case, the narrator is Anderson's cousin who later reveals that he possesses a tome whose frontispiece ("representing a number of sages seated around a table") was made by this infamous engraver. Strange things begin to occur in their habitual fashion and yet the anxious reader may become puzzled that Anderson, as someone clearly with a sideways interest in the occult, would not detect the hints. One in particular that perhaps should remain undetected:

The light was behind him, and he could see his own shadow clearly cast on the wall opposite .... Also the shadow of the occupant of Number 13 on the right ... Number 13 was, like himself, leaning on his elbows on the window-sill looking out into the street. He seemed to be a tall thin man – or was it by any chance a woman? – at least, it was someone who covered his or her head with some kind of drapery before going to bed, and, he thought, must be possessed of a red lamp-shade – and the lamp must be flickering much. There was a distinct playing up and down of a dull red light on the opposite wall. He craned out a little to see if he could make out any more of the figure, but beyond a fold of some light, perhaps white, material on the window-sill he could see nothing.

Should we add that the Golden Lion is "one of the very few houses that were not destroyed in the great fire of 1726"? It was right around that time that a hideous pact was completed between a future scholar at this university and, well, the being you would normally associate with hideous pacts. But we – and Anderson – still cannot account for that one night when he hears a song.  

Fear me not

It's about time I had a little secret to keep from her.

                                                                                                          Mikael Neumann

I have only one minor objection regarding this film, and that concerns the way in which a daughter ultimately discovers the 'truth' about her father. Surely the screenwriters could have thought a wee longer about this one (I couldn't help but stare gobsmacked at the screen as it unfolded). What happens after that revelation, which is, in keeping with good cinematic principles, not a revelation to a viewer of Fear me not, may disappoint those who tend to expect a film of suspense to devolve into a preposterous string of action scenes far beyond the physical capabilities of average citizens. No, the film hints in many directions, but proceeds down a consistent and straight path, and pays off in a most likely manner. All of which, of course, will strike that same disappointed crowd as unlikely. 

We begin one blue northern evening with a lean, middle-aged male inhaling smoke off the veranda of a rather fabulous lakeside house. This man is Mikael Neumann (a somewhat emaciated Ulrich Thomsen), and he is six weeks into a vacation that, from the sound of it, was precipitated by a total nervous breakdown. His comments – he will be our narrator and guide through a dark labyrinth – never really address his illness, if that is indeed the right term. He merely concedes that "certain details have great meaning," and that he "should take any opportunity that can help [him] move past" – what exactly, again we don't know. As he stands there and smokes, we wonder about this man, grim in Thomsen's unique way of looking at once both grim and lovable, thin and nervous without a single twitch, hungry in the way he devours his cigarette again and again. His wife Sigrid (Paprika Steen), an architect who inherited the house from her architect father, will never be mistaken for a beauty queen yet possesses what faddish writers like to call moxie. Within a few short minutes of spousal interaction, we learn the following about Mikael: he has a condition, or thinks he has a condition, that makes him a liability for simple chores and assignments; he is plagued by thoughts of his work colleague Jørgensen, who appears to be overdue for a dinner invitation; and he is either the stricter of the two parents or simply the more dominant, since when their only child Selma (Emma Sehested Høeg) tries to negotiate a return time from her boyfriend's place, Sigrid immediately defers to Mikael's permission of an extra hour. The small smile subsequently exchanged between father and daughter is one of true love and understanding, a vital detail because it suggests, in light of later events, that Mikael Neumann is not a monster. What he really is does not surface until the appearance of Sigrid's brother, the nebbish physician Frederik (Lars Brygmann).

Frederik is a scientist and a frightful bore; he is also a perfect foil to what we will be expected to understand as Mikael's latent heroic qualities. In a more normal film, however, Frederik would not flash that mildly sinister streak that we detect from the very beginning. Frederik, you see, comes from money, as does Sigrid, and his privileged existence's only genuine challenge is maintaining the interest of his dishy spouse Ellen (Stine Stengade). The two couples dine together chez Neumann and the subject of conversation between the siblings inevitably turns to the beautiful house that Sigrid, not Frederik, inherited. She's an architect, he explains to his wife, who doesn't seem to need the explanation. Indeed, a later scene determines that he and Ellen have been together for "ages," so how does this detail make sense? It only does if Frederik is providing a justification not to his wife but to himself. In other words, the only reason that Frederik did not get the house is because Sigrid embraced their father's vocation whereas he did not (while Sigrid apparently took "a long time" to get over her father's death, her brother's admission that he visited their father right before he passed away is met with Sigrid's genuine surprise). This subplot, abetted by clear erotic tension between Ellen and Mikael, who seem to agree in conspiratorial asides that the siblings are nice if a bit dull, adds a dimension to the film that renders the main story line all the more riveting. And what is that story line, you ask? An offer to fix Mikael's problem, made of course by his ever-helpful brother-in-law. In no small coincidence, the offer occurs at an unusual location: in the middle of our gorgeous lake upon which Mikael was staring as our film opened and which Frederik seems to behold with a restrained sigh. The two men row, row, row their boat well out of earshot, and Frederik just so happens to mention that, going forward, Mikael will be rowing alone. Frederik's free time will be violently dented by lab tests of a new anti-depressant on some volunteers. "The trick," he adds with the same flippancy, "is to get normal people to do it. Sick people will try anything." This greatly interests Mikael, seated so that he cannot see his brother-in-law. Frederik also cannot see Mikael's face, although we sense that the comment was well-planned and designed to bait Mikael in precisely the way it succeeds. "I don't think Sigrid would like you being a guinea pig," says Frederik, with no conviction whatsoever in that statement, eliciting the retort at the beginning of this review. 

Up to now, we have little more than an elegant, restrained portrait of someone who is ill: ill in the way that many people become ill; ill because life has changed and we have not changed or do not want to change; ill because life and we have taken different forks in the road yet seem to be aware of each other's presence, on skew tracks drifting farther and farther apart. Had the director not developed the plot any more deeply and just relied on the sustained excellence of his cast, we would likely have had a tidy melodrama with a sprinkling of memorable moments. But once Mikael gets his hands on the new anti-depressant, the film skids into a series of sharp turns yet never quite spins off the road. There is that spontaneous brawl at the clinic, towards which Mikael feels both repulsion and attraction; the even odder retreat to Mikael's birthplace in the countryside – our film is at pains to remind us that Mikael, to use an old idiom, is a husband of the left hand – where he encounters some old chums and a nubile eighteen-year-old by the name of Pia, but not the person he told Sigrid he was visiting, namely his mother; and then there is Ellen. The pills have made Mikael braver with life, as well as with the loveliest shades that life offers. "You ended up with Frederik but you always fancied me," he tells Ellen one temerarious evening. Her reaction addresses that claim, as well as apparently every other sentence the two have ever exchanged, and Ellen's perception of Mikael has shifted forever. Ellen is a lovely young lady, still studying as if she were student-age herself. "Is that why you won't have his children?" asks Mikael, again discharging from point-blank range. One thing leads to a few others and, ultimately, to a superb scene where Mikael and Sigrid discuss how Frederik wouldn't be able to handle certain information.  

Halfway through the film, Mikael returns to work and we finally get to see the enigmatic Jørgensen mentioned right at the beginning – but we don’t get to see him for long. Mikael waits alone in Jørgensen's office, takes a look at the latter’s family photograph, and decides he'll come back another day. Is Jørgensen only a McGuffin, the successful entrepreneur and family man that Mikael cannot become? Or is he the person in the original Danish title, Den du frygter (“He whom you fear”), some evil and distant enemy? One of Thomsen's great assets as an actor is an uncanny ability to make himself look honorable regardless of the situation. And perhaps that skill of deception is exactly what Mikael fears most.   

Der var engang en fest

An essay ("There was once a celebration") about this famous Danish film.  You can read the original here.

Is The Celebration based on a true story?  What follows is the unusual tale of one of Danish cinema’s greatest successes.

“I’ve written two speeches, father.  One is green, and one is yellow.  And you can choose which one it will be.”

“I pick green,” the father answers.

“Green is an interesting choice.  It’s a sort of truth speech.  And I have chosen to call it ‘When father took a bath.’”

So begins the drama in Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration.

Christian (Ulrich Thomsen) taps his glasses, stands up, and gives a speech on the occasion of his father’s sixtieth birthday.  After so many years of concealment and lies, the truth about his father’s sex abuse will now be disclosed; Christian’s twin sister just committed suicide, and the guests will now know why.  A celebration dripping with scandal which pulls the rug out from under the festivities – such is the brilliant concept behind The Celebration.  The comfort of home comes face-to-face with discomfort, and the invitees become tongue-tied spectators to a showdown in which the prodigal son, like a latter-day Hamlet, challenges his almighty father.

A celebration, a speech, incest – from where then was this idea taken?   Why did it assume this particular form?  What is the truth about the story behind the film?

For many years there were rumors that The Celebration was based on a real event, even if Vinterberg was always tight-lipped about it when asked.  Now, five years after The Celebration’s world premiere and prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival, the unusual story can be told, a story which offers some insight into the creative process and the fragile relationship between fantasy and reality.  At the same time it raises questions about art and a journalist’s responsibility with regard to the truth.

Jekyll and Hide

We recur to March 28, 1996.  Radio host Kjeld Koplev had settled himself down in the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s studio.  Koplev’s Switchboard, a weekly talk show on channel 1, was about to go on the air.  A thirty-four-year-old man was sitting across from Koplev.  He was the anonymous guest of the day, and he was noticeably nervous.

Koplev’s first question: “Allan, on your father’s sixtieth birthday, you got up and gave a speech.  What did you say in your speech?”

Allan: “I told him a little about my childhood, what he had done to me during my childhood, and what he had taken from me.  Because now everyone else had given speeches for him, so I wanted to give one, too.  You see, he hadn’t always been a perfect angel.”

Koplev uses a particular dramatic model, the “testimonial,” as the guiding force in his conversations.  “A successful episode of the Switchboard,” the radio journalist said recently, “begins with an opening that gets listeners to hang around; this establishes, so to speak, the theatrical space.  Over the course of the next two hours the pieces are laid in place, and dramatic progress is initiated.” 

That day Koplev struck upon a particularly alluring opening: birthday speeches.  In the two hours that ensued, he got Allan to narrate the speech’s horrific back story: at two, in the early 1960s, Allan and his twin sister Pernille moved with their mother from Copenhagen to a small, provincial town in Southern Jutland.  Their mother’s new husband worked as a chef in a hotel which the couple would subsequently take over and manage with great success.  Allan’s stepfather was very well-respected, indeed.  He moved in the town’s finest circles and spoiled the twins with material goods.  The eyes of their schoolmates lingered especially on the twins’ expensive clothes.

Yet the idyllic surface cloaked neglect, abuse, and unbelievable psychopathic behavior.  Just like Jekyll and Hyde, his stepfather would transform himself from a charming hotel owner who would see to the comfort of his guests, to a ruthless sex criminal who would abuse the twins on the sofa in the hotel office.  During these attacks, Allan would see his stepfather as “the silent dark man from the forest”; he had “empty, stinging eyes,” and during the very act would say, “hush, hush, hush – what you would normally say when you turn down a radio.”  The stepfather would only regain his normal facial expression after the matter had been concluded; it was then that he would slip back effortlessly into the role of smiling hotelier.

On numerous occasions his mother would literally catch her husband with his pants down, but do nothing.  The attacks began when Allan and Pernille were about five years old and would go on for years.  As adults Alan and Pernille would both move back to Copenhagen and study to become nurses, but Pernille retreated more and more into herself.  She would become psychotic and end up taking her own life.  But when the family attempted to play down her suicide, something took a hold of Allan.  On his father’s sixtieth birthday in front of seventy-eight guests, he would get his revenge.

Unsound alarm

A touching and fascinating radio program – and one you wouldn’t soon forget.  Thomas Vinterberg heard about the program and was taken with Allan’s courage and righteous wrath.  Vinterberg turned to his friend and manuscript guru Mogens Rukov while the latter was the midst of a peaceful midday meal in his kitchen.  “I’m tired of stories of homosexuals, incest, and pedophilia,” was Rukov’s blunt response.  But then he added: “I can remember family reunions from my own childhood.  I can remember the family.  Let’s do a story on a family business.  Then we can work incest into the family and the business.”

They agreed that the film should adhere to a normal course of events at a Danish family celebration: from the guests arriving, to lunch, to the guests’ departure the next morning.  This was a natural story, and the scandal which threw a spanner in the works was Christian’s speech and the series of speeches in its wake.  Rukov drew inspiration from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, yet Vinterberg’s most importance reference was Coppola’s Godfather.  Allan’s account, however, supplied the film’s basic elements: the hotel, the speech, the twin sister’s suicide, the patriarch (Henning Moritzen), the wild, unruly sister (Paprika Steen), the afterthought (Thomas Bo Larsen), as well as many telling details such as the black sofa in the office.

Yet there was one significant difference between the actual event and the film: Allan’s speech closed and demolished the party; Christian’s speech, however, was merely the opening volley in a harrowing and grotesque drama.  Where Allan’s speech ended was where Vinterberg’s film truly began. 

One part of the dramatization made the film studio’s attorneys sound the alarm.  The connection between The Celebration and Allan’s story was so obvious that Allan’s stepfather could press charges and, in a worst case scenario, even halt the filming itself.  The stepfather’s alleged crimes had never been brought before a judge, and out of fear of a lawsuit the film studio opted to cast the film as pure fiction.

“The events, people, and companies depicted in this film are fictitious.  Any similarity to people, alive or dead, or factual events, is purely coincidental,” began the film’s end credits, with not a word about Koplev’s Switchboard.

And whenever curious journalists persisted, Vinterberg’s answer remained: “My lawyers have placed limits on what I can say.”

Chilly feet 

Even I’m involved.  In 1999 I gave a talk on The Celebration and played part of a recording of Kjeld Koplev’s interview with Allan.  A media sources teacher stood up.  He found it amazing that there were seventy-eight guests, as well as all the cooking and service staff, and even a musician; that all of them experienced the worst party of their lives; that this party became the most talked-about Danish film of all time; and that not one of them had ever made a public pronouncement on the incident.  The teacher then put forth the theory that Vinterberg had trained and planted “Allan” in Koplev’s Switchboard as a type of media stunt, or simply one facet of the film’s robust mise-en-scène.

The theory sounded farfetched; nevertheless, after the talk I sat down and listened carefully to the radio program once more through.  I stopped the recording and noted the chronology of events in Allan’s life, and slowly his story began to crumble.  The number of deaths in Allan’s family were suspiciously high: in less than one year, his girlfriend, twin sister, and mother had all died.  He also confused the ages of his stepsiblings, had to make something up to explain an eleventh year at a boarding school, and was completely wrong about the date of the birthday speech.  I contacted Koplev, who said that, at the time, no one had verified Allan’s background or identity.  He admitted that he himself harbored some doubts about the story.  “At the beginning of the broadcast, Allan said that he and his sister were identical twins.  Yet as a trained nurse, he ought to have known that identical twins are always of the same gender,” emphasized Koplev, who learned that Allan died shortly after the radio program.         

We agreed to investigate the case, but after several weeks Koplev got cold feet.  He was afraid of discrediting his program or weakening the credibility of other journalistic programs DBC had in the works about incest.  Nor did Tulle Koefoed – head of the Copenhagen Support Center against Incest, and the person who allegedly placed Koplev in contact with Allan – wish to help.

Allan unearthed

I began a robust, but ultimately fruitless investigation, obliging me in an article in the Weekendavisen of May 5-11, 2000, to concede that all clues had led to a dead end.  The article yielded several inquiries.  An elderly woman from Southern Jutland was fully persuaded that she had read Allan’s story in a novel or other literary work, but, despite a devoted search, the book could not be found.  Only two years later, when P1’s Lisbeth Jessen was in the midst of creating a radio montage of the puzzling tale, did something finally happen.    

Jessen managed to track down Allan in a provincial town in Southern Jutland to which he had moved after his appearance on Koplev’s Switchboard.  Allan had AIDS and had been sick for many years.  He had never seen The Celebration, nor had the thought ever crossed his mind that the film could have anything to do with his own personal history.  Jessen arranged a meeting with Vinterberg.  “It is strange that such a tragedy can give another man wings.  But this is precisely what happened,” said Vinterberg.  He claimed to have told Allan of the great significance of his story to so many people.  “Your story made people ponder the secrets in their own families – secrets which, of course, are not necessarily of the same character.  Your tapping of your glass and standing up has had repercussions that have yet to fade.”

“Now the circle is closed,” said Allan, relieved.

Allan unburdened

But the story did not end here.  As it were, Jessen could not find a gravestone for Pernille; she was also amazed that Allan did not have a single picture of his beloved sister.  Jessen then spoke with Allan’s uncle, who could not at all recognize Allan’s story.  Finally Allan made a confession:  his twin sister had never existed, the hotel had never existed, the birthday speech had never been given, and Allan had never been a victim of incest.

I met with Allan a few days after Jessen’s radio montage.  He preferred to remain anonymous.  He was proud to have contributed to The Celebration, but embarrassed about having fooled so many people with his lies.  “This is where people need to learn that you can’t simply take everything for the gospel truth,” he said.  “Maybe the sluices to the media are too open.  After all, I have actually seen that you can go all the way to the end and just say, ‘ha-ha.’  So then how many stories are merely cut out of whole cloth?”

But Allan’s story is not cut out of whole cloth.  He really did have a very hard childhood.  He and his three stepsiblings lived in an old, decrepit house situated alongside a hotel; his parents worked on “booze cruises” and often came home drunk; he had a very bad relationship with his now-deceased stepfather; and, later in life, he was afflicted by great personal woe.  His male partner died from AIDS in 1995, and shortly after Koplev’s Switchboard, Allan was hospitalized in a psychiatric clinic for, as he termed it, “shrieking bats in the belfry.” 

“I don’t know whether the fantasy in my head grew in power because I had been feeling so sick,” said Allan.  “I truly believe that this was simply the expression of all the negatives, all the worries, all the bad things in my life.  I was also inspired by my experiences in the health care field, but a lot of the story – the speech, for example – was cut out of whole cloth.  I can remember thinking at the end of the radio show: ‘Let me get out of this.  The time can’t go fast enough.’  I thought they would strip all the microphones from me and thump me in the head.”  Despite his obvious talent for storytelling, Allan never felt tempted to become a screenwriter.  “You can produce a hit only once in life,” he grinned. 

We’re not in the truth industry

The mystery surrounding The Celebration has been solved.

This was no media stunt; this was no conspiracy or wily attempt at self-promotion; this was simply a long series of coincidences which led, in the end, to the greatest film in the history of Danish cinema.  And many persons participated in the film’s fantastic story.  Allan delivered the substance; Koplev, with his style of interviewing and sense for the dramatic, got Allan to step into character as a storyteller; meanwhile, Rukov and Vinterberg shifted, on the one hand, the focus from incest to the family get-together and the suppression of secrets, and, on the other hand, created a nerve-wracking dramatic plot.    

That The Celebration is based on a fabrication does not lessen it in any way.  An artist may enjoy lying; indeed, the fantastic can be necessary to relate a general or more profound truth.  “We are not in the truth industry,” said Rukov.  “We are in the storytelling industry.  Every so often we come across something that is truer than the truth.  Every so often we see something in the world which follows the rules of storytelling.”

The journalistic world, however, has a different behavioral code.  Here we expect a truth based on facts.  We expect that the stories presented to us correspond to reality.  A program like Koplev’s Switchboard hinges upon whether we can put our trust in the people appearing on the program.  Of course, you can’t always guard against hucksters.  But if Koplev had done his research, Allan would have never come to the studio.  

On the other hand, there would also never have been The Celebration.

Just Another Love Story

A precise translation of the title of this work would be "Love on film," which may suggest either a documentary featuring a number of amorous mammals or the reason why the term "Scandinavian movie" still makes some Germans blush and giggle.  Its name is odd given its contents, which are brutish, wild, and steeped in the noir tradition, but strange names have not prevented greater works from achieving the recognition they deserve.  As it were, the English re-christening captures the irony and indifference that such a moniker implies, and only elicitable by a rather average protagonist.  And in Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen) we have our man. 

Jonas lives the bourgeois life but dreams of something brighter and freer.  He has a plain wife, Mette (Charlotte Fich), two rascally children, a mortgage on a modern apartment on this island that he laments, an old and unfaithful car, and two close friends, one relentlessly cynical the other a chuckler.  What distinguishes Jonas from the mediocrity and respectability that harmless bourgeois life entails is his line of work: he spends his time photographing the recently and graphically deceased.  Police photographers do not have the most glamorous of tasks, and one of his friends, Frank, works in forensics staring at corpses night and day.  Frank is single, the son of Slavic immigrants (which might explain his abusive tone when speaking of other such newcomers), and convinced that family life should be a contract drawn up to avoid the flabby loneliness of middle age.  Perhaps Jonas, who dreams of greener pastures, should have taken his cue from Frank and simply had an affair on the side.  Not that such an action would do him any good in the long run, but at least it might have attenuated the attraction to a femme fatale by the name of Julia (Rebecka Hemse).

Julia is not a beautiful woman in any sense of the word.  She hails from a well-heeled half-Swedish family (Hemse herself is Swedish) who indulge her urges to frolic around the world on their dime, and who are thrilled to learn that she has gotten herself engaged to a Dane called Sebastian whom she met while backpacking in Southeast Asia.  But Julia is not quite as thrilled.  The first time we see her, in fact, she has the audacity to endure a bloody and mysterious flashback while driving just as Jonas's car stalls yet again on the freeway.  The result blinds and cripples Julia, as well as renders her amnesiac – although the flashback indicates that she was already having trouble remembering exactly what happened one hot and hopeless day in some place far less luxurious than a Hanoi Hilton.  Being the sappy, sentimental type, Jonas naturally feels responsible for the two-car pileup, especially after his repeated castigation by Mette regarding his decrepit car.  If your wife nags you to near-death, and in that near-death experience you find someone who is strikingly not your wife, is this not kismet?  So as he cradles Julia in his arms waiting for medical assistance she mutters the name Sebastian, at which point Jonas should have gently laid her down on the asphalt and let her die.  He, of course, does nothing of the sort.

What occurs thereafter is patently ridiculous in our conventional view of reality, but quite logical from another angle.  By lying to hospital security for a chance to visit Julia, Jonas – humble, heavy-set Jonas – becomes Sebastian.  Sebastian, the same fiancé whom Julia mentioned to her family; Sebastian, the same fiancé who Frank learns, well-connected to Danish diplomatic missions around the world, was found murdered in Hanoi weeks earlier.  Indeed, a vignette at the very beginning of the film shows a grizzled, thinner man (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) and a woman that greatly resembles Julia in some dingy hotel naked, sweaty, and contemplating what they should do with a pistol.  Julia's family quickly embraces Jonas as the Sebastian who just spent nine months loving their daughter, although her rather oblivious father announces his amazement as to how Jonas "is not like Julia's boyfriends, not a rock climber or a drug dealer, but a kind, ordinary fellow," just the Pimpernel they have always sought for their rebellious offspring.  Jonas begins spending more and more time in Julia's room recreating the existence that she cannot recall (a conceit used similarly in this film) until one evening she has had enough chitchat and wants to feel why they loved each other so much in the first place.  Only a few days later Julia whispers to Jonas that she is pregnant, which hitherto was apparently a near-impossibility, prompting Jonas to ask: "Here or in Hanoi?"  The answer he receives, corroborated by an angry physician who accuses him of rape, suggests that something is horribly awry.  And as in all film noir, our hero is already too deeply involved to extricate himself in time.

Hints are generously sprinkled throughout the film as to where this runaway train is heading, and fans of thrillers should have little trouble in deciphering the puzzle.  Nevertheless, a few thoughtful twists make the film more interesting than it should have been, which has always been the hallmark of talent; whether the tale really treats of love, however, depends on your conception of happiness.  In a moment of mantic insight Julia states that she is "terrified of regular meals and rituals" and could not imagine a spouse and two-child home with "friends coming over for dinner at six on Saturdays"; another vignette shows Jonas's life as fitting that description to a tee.  Jonas wants the opposite of all that, which he mistakenly believes to be the blind, disabled woman with a sordid past he holds and kisses in a hospital room he should never have been allowed to enter.  His drifting from Mette is cruel and gradual, but she sniffs it out from the start yet does not try to make herself more desirable because that no longer is an option.  In German the film has yet another title, "Unconditional" (or "Unconditionally"; German is famous for not having distinct adverbial forms), as in the pledge that Jonas as Sebastian makes to Julia and her family, as well as a very different pledge that Julia makes to the real Sebastian.  I suppose it could also refer to the wedding vows that Jonas shatters.  But noir has rarely provided us with any guidelines for good marriages.

Breaking the Waves

If you follow trends or, as I do, watch them dissipate like parti-colored liquids amidst the endless blue of the ocean, you will have noticed the modern motif "anything can happen." A watchword, we note, unimbued with the optimism of an "anything is possible." Rather, we are dealing with a world devoid of moral bearing, of unguided missiles slamming into one another from every angle at any given time. For that reason those of us who believe in salvation cannot bear to watch the gangster showdowns and existential poppycock that have become staples of modern cinema because they all amount to the same thing. If chaos or challenging general principles of societal conduct is your aim, you will fail because you will never find an appropriate alternative; the goal is only to overthrow the existing order for the sake of revolt and not because you have anything with which to replace it. Hence arises youth's riot, antisocial behavior that is a badge of honor for many teenagers with a pathetic pledge to nonconformity (which, of course, is another type of conformity) expressed in its violent speech, clothes, and music. You might achieve some semblance of power or wealth, but in the end you will be assaulted and deposed by a more ruthless and energetic version of yourself, and he soon enough by yet another improved version. This is evolution: death, destruction, survival of the most callous and selfish. Yet somewhere among these innumerable slayings over innumerable centuries we have found love. Not just sex– although sex is in many instances an expression of love – but real, wholesome, unending, blissful adoration. Love of what life offers us, what lies behind the ineluctable modality of the visible, what being moral and caring for others will come to mean over all our years and beyond. This film is about love, and it is one of the greatest ever made.

We find ourselves on the east coast of Scotland in the 1970s, a time when this director was becoming a man and imagining lands where he could be unrestrained in his ambition (all creative teenagers adopt other shores because nothing is more tedious than home; the luckiest eventually come to see that they had been growing up in those imagined lands all along). Like the ravaged villages in the wake of the pagan Viking conquerors, the town has few inhabitants, and over the centuries has turned into a pocket of what we currently term Christian fundamentalism. Now there is nothing wrong with fundamentalist Christianity apart from its name. Has Christianity so drifted from its core values as to become subject to revision by fierce troupes of Bible thumpers? That question, easily answered by someone of no faith, is more troubling to our heroine Bess (Emily Watson). Bess is a believer in the direct meaning of the word. She does not really believe in angels, or ancient events, or the Church as the divining rod of the Almighty; she simply believes that there is some force greater than she could ever imagine that guides and rules and hears everything and everyone. Specifically, it hears her. She talks to it but provides us and the camera with the other side of the conversation, which is unusual but which never devolves into those very modern delusions of communication that quickly get the self-dialoguer subdued or medicated. Bess believes this force exists just as we believe that our hand is attached to our arm, that a door can be opened and closed, and that when we step off our bed and onto the floor, the floor will not collapse or turn out never to have been there in the first place. Faith for her is not an intellectual debate, it is her compass and candle. She does not need ritual, prayer, communion, sacrifice, or the Passion. She needs only to talk and her God will answer her, probably by allowing her to come to the right conclusion on her own.

In a way, what Bess perceives as God are simply her reason and conscience working in tandem with a concept of how the world should be. She wants love and sex and, most of all, she wants to live. Persons of true faith understand that it is better to lead a happy and moral life because when you are old, you can enjoy it again – and, of course, there always remains the possibility of its eternal enjoyment. Bess wants everything a life should consist of: a good spouse, children, a warm, safe and loving home, enough material and nutritional pleasure to be neither in penury or decadence, friendship, laughter, and a chance to work at something she might enjoy. This is all she wants, and she is willing – indeed, this is the law within her – to lead this life with a man of no beliefs, a Scandinavian, and an outsider, the tall and brawny Jan (Stellan Skarsgård). Jan arrives in grand fashion, and late, to their wedding. Once his helicopter touches down, Bess pummels him for his lack of punctuality, but her blows – Bess at this point is still small and delicate – bounce off him and the love he has for her. They wed and she insists that she lose her virginity in the bathroom. Why this insistence?  Strategically, it will set the tone for subsequent impulsive urges, more often than not somewhat unbecoming of a sweet young woman. But the suggestion also fits with what we know of Bess: she wants to live. She has the hardly uncommon desire to make love in a public place and be able to say, only really to herself, that she did it. Not to be seen or heard, but simply to know what it's like, because such an act doesn't really hurt anyone else. Her marriage to Jan does not please the locals, who dislike his religious indifference or ignorance and the fact that he is a Norseman. Jan also has an unappreciated profession: he works on a rigging platform in the North Sea, and is often away for weeks at a time. Bess misses him and makes us miss him, and her pining away for his hasty return leads to exactly that when a freak accident injures Jan and he is brought back to shore unmoving, paralyzed, and bedridden.

Somehow Bess senses that her prayers, or whatever you want to call her talking to herself, were responsible for Jan's having been lamed, and she resolves to do whatever it takes to make him feel like a whole man again. Eventually we hear his request: she should find other men, it doesn't really matter who they are, and with them continue the physical part of her relationship with Jan. But, it is implied, she should not love them. They are only there because Jan's body has been taken from him, but not his soul, his heart, or his mind. Those still belong to her, and so she can only pursue carnal pleasures and then report back to him on how they went. She loves him, she feels guilty for what happened, and, most of all, she believes that everything will work out. Jan will walk again, she thinks and says; of that she is convinced. All she has to do is abide by his will. Yet the acts that she commits with strangers are not for Jan, but for herself. In his odd way, and likely owing to a great deal of sexual experience, Jan understands that the time for such hijinks is when one is young. Never to have had a casual encounter, never once to have sweated and groaned in the arms of someone with whom you shared no past or future – these were the benchmarks of the culture of free love that was peaking in Scandinavia at the time. On a less topical note, these have always been the fantasies of people who are uninclined to marry, and Jan, strange as it may seem, is certainly one of those people. He encourages her because he would want her to do the same if the roles were reversed. This is undoubtedly selfish; but it is how Jan sees the world and there is nothing to be done about it. Besides, it is rather revolting to call a paraplegic selfish even when he inflicts such emotions on others.

Many laborious attempts have been made to analyze the motives behind Jan's request and Bess's compliance, but these are as clear as the sky towards which Bess's eyes seem constantly directed. Jan and Bess simply impose their own values on each other. Jan believes in sexual freedom and, more broadly, in letting people live the way they wish without judging them, which is another way of saying that he detests being judged. On the other hand, Bess believes in one mate and doing whatever necessary to make that relationship work. Some may say that she doesn't know better; but even if she did she might make the same decision. The adventures that Bess undertakes, including a very bad time on an offshore tanker with some rather rough (paying) customers, teach her that love and life are functions of how one acts, how one treats others, and what one comes to think of oneself. Bess is already an outsider because she does not sit in the amen corner and holler along with the congregation. Yet her brand of Christianity is the purest and truest that could be found because she believes, first and foremost, in love. The film shifts gears a few times and is unpleasantly seasoned with some pop hits from the time period, but the acting and script sail and saunter with outstanding vigor. Watson is so fantastic that we forget that she is an actress or that she is, in fact, Emily Watson. She becomes this sad young woman who only wants to live and love and give her heart and mind some sensual and vibrant mementos for later perusal. And there are few films as sensual and vibrant as this masterpiece, few works of cinematography that feel both like a film and like the truth, like cleverly designed artifice and pure inspiration. Here love is celebrated, love in its bizarre and personal forms (which is true love; love is never a harlequin romance because we are not harlequins) and every love story becomes a masterpiece of its own and the greatest achievement we can attain before the darkness swallows our bones. Even when we can hear bells in the distance.